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"The range of Alan Tansman's coverage is truly prodigious and diverse--from the most obscurantist cultural analysis through mawkish sentimentality and orchestrated nostalgia for the medium past. His scholarship is impeccable: he knows the relevant secondary literature and has absorbed an impressively wide-ranging metacritical literature, which he has used with great originality and authority to untangle the knotted relationship between aesthetic modernism and fascism. He reads difficult texts brilliantly, with seeming and enviable effortlessness and his translations are a joy to read."--Harry Harootunian, University of Chicago "Alan Tansman opens up a new apprehension of the fantastic possib...
With a history stretching back nearly 1,500 years, written works originating from Japan encompass a vast range of forms and genres. Since the eighth century, poetry and the non-philosophical lyric voice have occupied a central position in Japanese cultural life. The art of narrative would soon follow, blossoming in the eleventh century with one of the world's great literary masterpieces, Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji. Japanese literature later developed other genres no less important than poetry and narrative, among them the diary, the free-flowing essay, drama, the picture book, and the literary treatise. While intensely attentive to its own tradition, Japanese literature has also em...
Amidst a culture otherwise obsessed with beauty, the Greek theater provided a unique space for Athenians to play with ugliness—to try these anti-ideals on for size. Such imaginative play was considered dangerous by some, such as Plato, who feared its corrupting influence; others, including Aristotle, saw the theater’s provocation and release of emotions as educational and even therapeutic. Sophocles’ and Euripides’ fifth-century audiences could not help but directly confront the ugliness of their drama, but as cultural memory of embodied productions faded, an abstracted contrast emerged between beautiful tragedy and ugly comedy—a pernicious aesthetic polarization that persists to t...
The contributions to Concepts of Philosophy in Asia and the Islamic World reflect upon the problems implied in the received notions of philosophy in the respective scholarly literatures. They ask whether, and for what reasons, a text should be categorized as a philosophical text (or excluded from the canon of philosophy), and what this means for the concept of philosophy. The focus on texts and textual corpora is central because it makes authors expose their claims and arguments in direct relation to specific sources, and discourages generalized reflections on the characteristics of, for example, Japanese culture or the Indian mind. The volume demonstrates that close and historically informed readings are the sine qua non in discussing what philosophy is in Asia and the Islamic world, just as much as with regard to Western literature Contributors are Yoko Arisaka, Wolfgang Behr, Thomas Fröhlich, Lisa Indraccolo, Paulus Kaufmann, Iso Kern, Ralf Müller, Gregor Paul, Lisa Raphals, Fabian Schäfer, Ori Sela, Rafael Suter, Christian Uhl, Viatcheslav Vetrov, Yvonne Schulz Zinda, and Nicholas Zufferey.
Uncovers the ways in which the spectator's memory informs theatrical reception
This text presents an examination of Murasaki Shikibu's 11th-century classic The Tale of Genji. The author explores the role of possessing spirits from a female viewpoint, and considers how the male protagonist is central to determining the role of these spirits.
This series of interpretations of selected classics examines premodern Japanese literature from the perspective of conflictual ideologies. Professor Marra's analysis of such works as the Ise Monogatari, the Hojoki, and Tsurezuregusa highlights the existence of discontent in the authors of the so-called high tradition and explains the means these authors used to express their social dissatisfaction in literary texts. His aim is to recover the validity of the historicist approach in literary studies by focusing on the importance of the context in the formation of the text. The text is seen as a product of ideological manipulation on the part of those who, by reading, writing or editing, appropriate it according to specific and private concerns. Professor Marra displays both sensitivity to the texts and a comprehensive grasp of Japanese and Western scholarship in making his argument that aesthetics and politics in premodern Japanese literature are mutually defining.
In this groundbreaking book, Matsuoka Shinpei—a leading scholar of noh theater—provides a detailed account of the birth of one of Japan’s most celebrated art forms. Although noh has often been associated with the elite, Embodied Performance explores its links to a wider popular culture, revealing a rich and colorful public space where courtiers and commoners mingled. Matsuoka traces noh’s connections to popular and religious dances, linked verse, and chigo (beautiful temple boy) culture, emphasizing performance and the body. He describes the world of noh playwright Zeami as well as his views on dramaturgy and performance—and argues that Zeami was once a chigo. Matsuoka shows how re...
This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies
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